


In Translation

by EagleOfTheNinth



Category: Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine (RPG)
Genre: (that last bit is Very Important), AU, And love, Gen, Jasper Irinka is having an exciting time offscreen, Nonbinary Character, alternate character conception, and I won't pretend otherwise, and telling the Headmaster to eat his own dick, but nobody is exactly having FUN, but so is friendship, gmd campaign, look fuckers dark shit is an integral part of CMWGE, references to trauma and PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:29:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21807463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EagleOfTheNinth/pseuds/EagleOfTheNinth
Summary: "You think this is actually the second time you’ve existed. You just lost your existence the first time. That’s why Chuubo was able to bring it back!"-alternate character concept for the Best Friend, from the Glass Maker's Dragon campaign book
Relationships: Seizhi Schwan & Chuubo
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9





	In Translation

In your dreams, you are running.

Your heart batters at your ribs, there’s a stitch in your side. You pant from exertion and clutch tight to someone’s hand, and she is running as fast as you are, as desperate, because you are both running for your lives.

She isn’t anyone you know. She isn’t your mom, or your dad or brother, or any of your friends. You can never quite remember her face, when you wake. You just know she loves you, and that you love her, and that she is older than you. That she protects you. Except she can’t protect you from this. She can only hang onto your hand and drag you with her, yelling at you to _run faster, Seizhi, **move**!_

(Except it isn’t _Seizhi_ that she says, and yet you can’t remember either what else it might be.)

She’s terrified. You are too.

You are running from the Outside. It is not a faraway thing, in the dream. It is a great tide of blinding light and ugly colour and cacophonous noise, and it is hungry, and relentless, and coming after both of you, not like a predator comes after prey, but like a flood comes after the people and animals who flee from it. Mindless and unstoppable.

It’s inevitable what happens, really.

You can’t keep up. She’s taller than you, her stride too long, and you’re built for strength, not speed. Your hand slips out of hers. You fall behind. You fall.

You get one last glimpse of her face, the face you can never remember, you see the horror, see her reaching for you-

-it’s too late. The tide crashes over you.

She cries out your name.

The dream doesn’t end after that, though. The Outside overwhelms you, overloads you, breaks down your _self_ till you’re nothing but another screaming voice in the chaos. No, though-not even a screaming voice. You are a scream. You don’t have enough identity left to be a _voice_.

Everything hurts, and everything is terrifying, there’s no solid ground anywhere, nothing gentle, nothing sane, nothing calm, nothing good or right. You drift in noise and tumult and you are _Lost_.

This is generally the point when someone hears you shrieking and comes to wake you up. The dream doesn’t come every night, but it happens often enough that over the years your parents and Laodemus have gotten used to it. Sleepovers, though, are awkward. You avoid those whenever possible.

(Except when they’re with Chuubo, and him alone. He has chronic nightmares himself, just as inexplicable as yours. His are of fire, of being helpless as something burns, of being unable to move and hearing the cries of people he can’t do anything to save.

You know what it means when he begins whimpering in his sleep that he’s sorry, he’s so sorry, he didn’t _mean_ to!

He can recognise the fear on your dreaming face before you even start crying out aloud.

If you’re lucky, one of you will shake the other awake before their dream gets to the _really_ bad bit.)

* * *

When you’re twelve, Chuubo shows you the Wish-Granting Engine, and a lot of things click horribly into place.

That happened to you, didn’t it? That’s why you’ve never felt quite _right_.

It’s because you weren’t always like this. You were someone else…some _thing_ else…and you drowned in the Outside. And then…then Chuubo brought you back. By accident. But not as yourself.

The more you think about it, the more sure you are that you weren’t human before, even if you kind of are now. (Sort of.) You’re a translation of what you once were, and no translation can be a hundred per cent accurate. Even the best; _especially_ the best. Your face and your voice, your red hair and curving sturdy frame and freckled skin, they’re all attempts to express in metaphors a nature that Creation doesn’t have the right vocabulary for. That’s why the name the dream-woman calls you is different. It’s your original one. It’s the name you _used_ to have.

…how much of your _mind_ is a translation, too? The question scares you to think about.

You aren’t ungrateful, though. Quite the opposite. Being made different is _such_ an improvement over not being at all. You get to be a person, now, you get an _identity_. Like a map with a helpful arrow on it pointing to your location; _You are Here_. Seizhi is here.

You just wish you could trust that you won’t lose everything again. And you wish you could remember your old name. That’s all.

* * *

You don’t remember your old name, but one night you _do_ remember the dream woman’s. You grab your journal and scrawl it down the moment you jolt awake; you _cannot_ forget it.

A second word comes to you on the heels of the name, and you jot that down underneath it. _Momo_. Mother.

…you hope she got away. That she ran fast enough. That she didn’t hesitate long enough for the Outside-tide to drown her too.

You hope she’s okay. Out there, somewhere, knowing who she is, and _okay_.

* * *

(A couple days after that there’s a family fight, and you lose your temper, and you end up shouting _you’re not my REAL mom_! This at least confuses everybody else into losing track of the argument, because Melancholy Schwan very clearly remembers _giving birth to you._

You don’t explain. You’re honestly not sure where to even _start_. You love these people, you have memories of a life with them, and even when they drive you insane you know they love you too. It really was not fair to say what you did. And it would be even _less_ fair to admit to being a cuckoo in the nest.

They _are_ your real family by any metric that counts. But it still hurts that you don’t know where or what your first mother is. That you can’t recall even a translation of her face.)

* * *

When you’re fifteen your entire life goes to hell in a handbasket, or rather to the Bleak Academy in your brother’s airship. There’s a glass dragon on the loose and assorted nightmares, Mysteries, and sacred horrors coming out of the woodwork. Every bird ever is apparently trying to betray you, and your best friend turns out to be not an ordinary kid with a cute smile but the last surviving serpent of the dead World-Ash, who gave himself amnesia in a not really successful attempt to mitigate what has to be the worst fucking case of PTSD slash survivor’s guilt _ever_.

(And that’s just the _highlights_.)

Somehow as part of all this you end up being put on trial. By the Bleak Academy. As a proxy for Reality’s crimes against the Not.

Which, _really_? You’re pretty sure you don’t even go here. Or, well. Didn’t _used_ to go here.

The Headmaster seems deeply annoyed by your existence, which is fair, given that you hate _his_ just as much after all the shit he’s done to you, your friends, and Town in general. He is, of course, the judge in your farce of a trial. Because why would he be anything _else_ , the abusive egotist.

Since you have absolutely no illusions that anything you say in defence either of yourself or reality will do a whit of good, when called to the witness stand you feel free to tell him exactly what you think of him instead. And not in the dialect of Town, either. There’s nothing familiar about this soulless, bitter place…but the words its staff and students use? _Those_ awaken memories. So you tell him off in flawless, perfectly-accented Ninuanni.

For such a pale guy, he can sure go purple with rage!

You are pretty sure you are going to die, and also have run out of fucks to give about that fact, but then Jasper crashes a _much bigger_ airship than Laodemus’s through the courtroom wall, and everyone including the Bleak contingent loses the plot for a bit, and _somehow_ you and your friends come out of the ensuing chaos more or less alright.

* * *

It isn’t just your trial. Somehow, things work out, in general. Sort of.

‘Sort of’ is really probably as much as anyone gets to hope for. You think even Jasper would agree.

And at least things have calmed down enough that each of you can break down a little without worrying that it will get you killed.

“I don’t know what to wish for,” Chuubo tells you one Sunday, the two of you alone in the empty house at the end of his street. He’s said that before, many times, but then it was always a request for good (or interestingly bad) ideas, and this time it’s an admission of helplessness, if not quite hopelessness. There’s a haunted look to his face now that you think may never quite go away.

(Jasper asked him once, shortly after the dust settled, whether he was going to wish himself forgetful again. He said he wasn’t. _It hurts whether I remember or not. And remembering is better. At least now I know **why.**_ )

You hug him, hard, and he clings to you in response. He is not human and neither are you but your bodies are warm and solid, your arms are strong. You are still best friends by universal law; you love each other, and that is something. “I’ll think of something for you,” you tell him, and you wonder what.

You could wish for something small. Not ice cream, that never works, but…some extra cash for a trip to Arcadia, maybe. A turn riding the pale horse Jasper ‘liberated’ from her father, who is extremely pleased to have a master who gives him peppermints and braids his mane and doesn’t dig spurs into his ribs. A night’s sleep without bad dreams. But those don’t seem quite right.

You could wish for something big and showy and exciting. But honestly, you don’t have the energy for excitement yet, and neither does he.

You can’t wish for everything to be okay. That would be _asking_ for miraculous backfire.

But maybe you can wish for something that will make things a _bit_ better…? A bit easier. A bit less painful.

Less alone.

…that’s _it_.

“Hey, Wish-Granting Engine!” you call out to the behemoth of singing, sighing steam and shining metal that takes up most of the room. “This is Seizhi Schwan. Chuubo’s letting me make a wish for once-okay, Chuubo?” He nods. “I wish there was someone he could talk to about all this stuff, who’d understand. Someone older. _Not_ the principal,” you add, hastily. It’s not that you dislike Principal Entropy II, but he’s not the sort of person you can actually have a conversation with. He tends to panic and flee dramatically whenever emotions get involved. “Someone kind, and smart.” You pause to consider. “And they have to give good hugs. That’s my wish.”

The wheels and cogs in the Engine turn. The sparkers spark. The creaking component creaks, and the portion that’s intended for honking honks, and the bells shimmer with silvery sound, and the make-a-joyful-noise component gives joyful shout; the whole thing shudders and burns with its power-

-but the beacon on the top doesn’t light, doesn’t fire any lance of light to Heaven. Instead, a door swings open in the side, a door that was there all along but that up till now you’d just thought was a strange bit of ornamentation, and a person steps out.

She’s tall and straight-backed like a pine tree, her hair all loose blonde curls tied back with a ribbon. You can’t pin down her age, somehow. She could be just a couple of years older than you, or as old as your brother, or older than your parents. She’s wearing an elaborate, steampunky sort of outfit, with a hooped skirt and a toolbelt a bit like Leonardo’s and a stovepipe hat decorated with a gold ribbon and gleaming brass gears.

She looks at Chuubo, uncertain but warm and worried. And then she looks at you-

-and something blooms in your chest, painful and bright, in the second before she averts her eyes.

You think you saw something-

Something in her expression, just for a second-

“Hello, Chuubo,” she says, curtseying gracefully, “and hello, Seizhi.” (Does she pause just a second, before saying your name? Did you imagine that?) “My name is Lilimund Cartaign. I’m the spirit of the Wish-Granting Engine. I’m sorry I haven’t spoken to you before this. I wasn’t sure it was allowed, until now.”

“…You make the wishes come true.” Chuubo is guarded, distrustful, and you can understand why. So many of his wishes have gone so very wrong.

But Lilimund shakes her head. “They happen through me, but I don’t control how they turn out. I don’t know why. I-I am new to this, honestly. I wish-” -a brief, dry laugh at her own inadvertent turn of phrase- “-that I could make certain they would never cause pain. Especially to you. But it doesn’t seem to work like that.”

Chuubo relaxes, or perhaps slumps. “Nothing ever works like that,” he agrees, softly.

“I would protect you if I could. I’m glad I can talk to you now.”

“I’m glad, too.”

She goes to hug him at that, but he skips backwards, evading her; she begins to apologise, but he interrupts. “Before this goes any further,” his voice unusually firm, “why are you looking at Seizhi like that?”

She’s taken aback. “I’m not looking at them…?”

“Yeah, exactly, you’re _not looking at them_ so hard that it’s basically backwards staring! And they’re doing the same thing to _you_! Do you guys know each other?”

God _dammit_ , Chuubo chooses the _worst_ moments to be perceptive sometimes. How have you survived being friends with him.

Lilimund’s eyes go wide, and she tenses. “That’s not-”

“Seizhì?” His hand slips into yours, squeezes gently. “ _Do_ you know her?”

The bright thing in your heart throbs. You think of a word you don’t remember learning in this life; _cintamani_. A jewel from the quiet dark.

“I don’t know anyone called Lilimund Cartaign,” you begin, carefully. (Her shoulders slump. Just slightly. Just enough for you to notice.) “And I didn’t know the Engine had a spirit, but…” You hesitate. _Please_ , you think, a prayer to no god or all of them. “…but. I used to know someone called Liuvimund.”

…you can’t describe the look on her face. Except, maybe, with two words alone. _Hope_ , and _pain_. Her hands are shaking. “Suezia?” she whispers. “You _remember_?”

* * *

_“Suezia, run faster!”_

_“I can’t-”_

_“You **have** to!”_

* * *

There is a warmth in tears. Messy and awkward and desperate. Real in a way that has nothing to do with the divide between Is and Is-Not.

Liuvimund’s toolbelt is getting in the way of your hug. Something that feels like a wrench is digging into you. You don’t really mind.

Chuubo hovers uncertainly, caught between closing the distance and backing away. You both make the decision for him at the same moment, reaching out and pulling him into the circle of your arms and bodies. Nobody left out _here_!

It’s thanks to him that this is possible, after all.

That you can be here, alive.

That you know your name.


End file.
